Over the past two decades, as new information about Cold War espionage cases has trickled out of American and former Soviet archives, the impassioned defenders of such accused spies as Judith Coplon, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Harry Dexter White, Lauchlin Currie, Larry Duggan, and Alger Hiss have retreated, step by step, from their confident assertions about how Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, and J. Edgar Hoover, with the help of Harry Truman and other feckless Democrats, orchestrated a red scare that persecuted innocent Americans with baseless charges of spying. The only prominent figure to be vindicated by the documents was J. Robert Oppenheimer, the war-time director of Los Alamos, who was never recruited by Soviet intelligence.
One of the few cases still generating controversy, that of the Rosenbergs, no longer is marked by claims that they were innocents framed by the United States government. Their sons now admit their father was a spy, although they continue to insist he was neither a very important one nor an atomic spy—despite his having recruited two men who turned over information about the Manhattan Project. Their defense of their mother is that her assistance to Julius’s espionage was minor and not deserving of the death sentence.
Joan Brady’s new book is a rerun of the 1970s conspiracy theories.
Joan Brady’s new book, Alger Hiss Framed: A New Look at the Case that Made Nixon Famous, published in Great Britain in 2015 as America’s Dreyfus: The Case Nixon Rigged
